I went to one, and given that a lot of the material covered was made available online afterwards, and I wasn't too keen on networking or talking to vendors, it ended up mostly being an excuse to have an expensed trip to another city with nicer weather

For anyone who is curious, here is a link to the strategy mentioned: https://paulmerriman.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/UBH-FTYAA-Tables-70-30-0-2017-Returns-Update.pdf I am curious how strongly the combination of Portfolio 1-4 is correlated with VTSAX. Also per this article: http://www.etf.com/sec...

My personal opinion, at least for guitars and other stringed instruments (ukuleles, mandolins, etc.) is that there is sort of an "80-20" rule when it comes to how much money you spend. i.e. you can get 80% of the desired quality for 20% of the max cost. Take guitars for example, say there is general...

40k grand piano. Well worth it. 4k acoustic guitar. Well worth it. In fact, among the best buys I've ever made. I don't have a collection of guitars/pianos, just the above. It's a world of difference between the nice stuff and the stuff below. I don't know much about violins, but I knew some hardco...

The stock price of Netflix is quite mystery to me. From value investor point of view, the company financial is quite garbage with regard to its near 300 P/E ratio, 15+ years after IPO, still negative free cash flow, still heavy in debt and depends on borrowing for growth instead of internal cash fl...

I like California Olive Ranch brand - it is a little bit more expensive than what others are suggesting, but I really like the taste. America's Test Kitchen came to the same conclusion, so I feel pretty validated: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/taste_tests/1637-supermarket-extra-virgin-olive-oil

Using "credit card" gift cards can be a really huge pain depending on how the vendor's CC processing works, and whether you know the exact amount left on the card. I have had issues where I wanted to pay for dinner or buy clothing but couldn't cover the entire cost, and they got declined because the...

It got so bad in recent years especially with web stacks that you can't even find books that are current. By the time Angular 2 book shows up, the latest is already Angular 6. By the time you go through Angular 2 book, people are already on to some other framework. Everything is moving at the speed...

Software Engineer. It used to be a great gig. It was like getting paid to play. Lately, not so much. :( Wage busting, glass ceiling, ageism, offshoring, deteriorating working conditions ... now its a meh job. :( :( Some software work is cutting edge, glamorous, and exciting. It is even rumored to b...

It's just a number. While it may be a goal worth noting, it's a bit like driving across the border from Ohio to Indiana...the landscape will not have changed much--financially or otherwise. You really aren't much better off than you were at $990,000. I agree, and I have never driven between Ohio an...

Software Engineer. It used to be a great gig. It was like getting paid to play. Lately, not so much. :( Wage busting, glass ceiling, ageism, offshoring, deteriorating working conditions ... now its a meh job. :( :( Some software work is cutting edge, glamorous, and exciting. It is even rumored to b...

Software engineer - I would absolutely recommend it. I have a hard time seeing the demand slow down any time soon, and it is easily the most lucrative career you can have with the lowest amount of education. You can feasibly get OK-paying entry-level jobs being self-taught without a college degree. ...

A bigger pet peeve of mine is the media using "points" as a metric. The Dow is up 17 points! The SP500 is down 83 points! Points are meaningless, give me a percentage. They don't mean basis points do they? Also something I am not clear on - because basis points are a change in percentage right?

I feel like when you see any sort of cable TV shows talking about the stock market, they always point out how much "the Dow" went up or down. I never really understood what this meant when I was younger, and after looking into it, I am still confused about what this really means. From wikipedia: > T...

Move to Washington state. No state income tax, very likely still good enough job opportunities (although not sure what field you are both in).
Being frugal is pretty easy - the only real high-cost-of-living is housing, but you can be frugal about renting/using public transit/etc.

I have 100/100 and in most of the rooms in my apartment I can get ~80-90 over wifi. We have the option for 1000/1000 for $20 more a month, but we don't stream in 4k or download anything too crazy, so it hasn't been worth the upgrade. I would not buy and especially would not rent their router - do yo...

I don’t want to sound too rude, but it’s pretty strange to me that you’d want to basically throw out all of the time and money you have invested in to med school so soon after completing. I am assuming you aren’t going to be in debt from it? Even if you are on a super fast careeer trajectory in tec...

I don’t want to sound too rude, but it’s pretty strange to me that you’d want to basically throw out all of the time and money you have invested in to med school so soon after completing. I am assuming you aren’t going to be in debt from it? Even if you are on a super fast careeer trajectory in tech...

Could they just be a regular personal trainer instead? I have seen a lot of people get sucked into various MLMs and it is almost never worth it - a lot of the behavior they encourage can also be really damaging to personal relationships (i.e. spamming social media, constantly soliciting friends and ...

It’s really interesting to me as someone who is younger see the different perspectives, but is also giving me mild apprehension about whether I will even last until my 40s/50s without getting burnt out enough to make a significant career change. I’m pretty focused on FIRE right now so that if I do h...

They both do slightly different things - the first is for ads, the second is for tracking cookies and sites that embed in others (i.e. the Facebook like button) that can be used to track you across sites.

FYI - If your child is considering Math, I would suggest looking at Statistics or "Data Science" instead. I expect "Big Data" will be providing lots of jobs in the future. I wouldn't recommend a pure science or plain Math as it may require a graduate degree to get a decent job. My undergrad degree ...

This might be a little bit pedantic, but I think it's probably good to just say "engineering" and not "STEM". I have noticed that a lot of people fall into what I consider the "STEM" trap where you are still doing science, but will have very different job prospects. For example, someone graduating w...

I don’t really remember my parents buying anything special that I didn’t already have, with the exception of maybe a collapsible easy-to-carry hamper for laundry and a shower caddy. I think someone already suggested it but a small safe that you can attach to the bottom of the bed is a good idea; bed...

As someone working at a large tech company, the one thing I will say is that the “data scientist” role is not as mature and the job description is much more nebulous than say a conventional software engineer. If you do want to go into “data science” I would make sure you have very strong programming...

2 things... About those $1500 apartments in Seattle... every place I see for $1500-2000 on Craigslist has a fatal flaw (terrible neighborhood, dump of an apartment, killer commute, or the ad looks like a scam). As far as age discrimination, reports of it are actually overblown. Everyone I know who ...

At that income, unless I am wrong, the most you can put in tax advantaged retirement accounts is $23.5k right? Not counting HSAs? I am in a similar position and outside of an emergency fund I put everything I have left after each months expenses in my taxable account which has a fairly aggressive AA...

My SO and I like to think that we eat fairly healthy, and I think we spend around $600 a month to feed two of us. We buy bulkier dry or canned ingredients from Safeway where they are cheapest, and stuff where the quality is more of a concern (like meat and produce) or specialty items like nice chees...

If they went under (and there could be reasons why nobody would want to buy Wealthfront, they may not want exposure to the "total return swaps" and lawsuits related to that), my understanding is the assets would be transferred to another brokerage firm. Then you'd have a mess of ETFs or whatever fu...

I also posted about leaving recently - right now I have turned off TLH and am waiting for the funds to return to the primary Vanguard ETFs just because it isn't really hurting anything to have them there and to make the impending transfer have the fewest # of funds possible. What would be the hypoth...

I have found that being proactive about not exposing yourself to shady websites is just as valuable as having anti-virus. When browsing I use Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin plug-ins which between the two blocks most shady ads, which seem like the most common way to get infected recently. The earli...

Wealthfront has a "Direct Indexing" product: https://research.wealthfront.com/whitepapers/tax-optimized-direct-indexing/ Some of the OP's positions seem to be one single share. If the OP pays a commission to sell, then the commission will eat up a huge percentage of the single share holdings. Wealt...

Since I am going through my tax stuff this week anyways, I looked at the net loss from Wealthfront's TLH from 2017 and it was about 2-2.5x what I paid in fees. So it seems like at least for 2017, to answer my own question, had I not done any TLH on my own, it was probably worth it. Comparing that to...

bert09: One of the biggest but little-known problems with Wealthfront and similar robo-advisors is the large number of funds they use in their portfolios. As a result, in taxable accounts, the investor is often stuck with capital-gains when they later sell or exchange securities. Knowledgeable inve...

The follow up question I would have then, is transferring my WF account to say Vanguard going to screw all of this up? Would it be necessary to sell the funds I currently have in there and then re-buy in VG for whatever asset allocation I want? It seems like I would be realizing all the gains that ...

I think robo advisors who say they can TLH for clients are just taking advantage of people who are too lazy and too fearful to do it themselves. It is about as easy as making oatmeal for breakfast, but many people would rather eat cold cereal or nothing for breakfast. To be completely honest, you d...

Hello all - first time posting here and was wondering if I could get some help with figuring out whether or not the robo-investor I am using is worth it with its current fees. When I got started with investing, one of my friends referred me to Wealthfront - it was an easy way to get started, I like ...